McLEAN, VA-Michael Pralle, the new president and COO at J. E.Robert Cos., has only been on the job for a few days so he is notready to lay out his strategic vision for the firm for the next 10years, he tells GlobeSt.com. One thing of which he is sure of,however, is that JER's investment focus will be increasingly onglobal markets. Pralle, with an extensive background ininternational real estate investment, is gearing up to duplicateand hopefully exceed his accomplishments at GE Real Estate, wherehe was also president and CEO managing a global business portfolioof over $78 billion in assets in 28 countries.

“[JER] is at an inflection point where it has an opportunity toaccelerate its global investment,” Pralle tells GlobeSt.com. “Rightnow it has a great platform with multiple [international] funds. Itis a very exciting time for the company.” Indeed, just a fewexamples of JER's global reach include the Marbleton Property Fund,a $321-millionequity pool that will focus on investments across all propertysectors in Russia and Ukraine, JER Europe FundIII, which has a total buying power of up to $5.4 billion,and growing investments in Latin America.

“We see many opportunities outside the US and want to bepositioned well to take advantage of them,” he says. Among theseopportunities is the simple equation of less capital chasing dealsand the inherent benefits of global diversification. For instance,he says, at GE he never ran up against Blackstone in Japan, “but inthe US when we looked at EOP [for possible acquisition] there wasBlackstone. Also, diversification is a cornerstone of any goodinvestment policy: if one market goes down it doesn't necessarilyhave to bring down an entire portfolio.”